The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Zombie Ideas Causing Trouble Again

Recently I came across the term “zombie ideas”. I
really don’t remember where it was, so I can’t give due credit to the inventor,
but I have to borrow this. A “zombie idea” is one that ought to have been dead
a long time ago, but it won’t lie down and give up. Regrettably, there are a
lot of people who welcome zombie ideas and keep them in circulation-- perhaps just because they heard of these
ideas a long time ago and their vague familiarity gives them some of the credibility
of tradition. Anyway, zombie ideas are definitely in our midst, and if you look
through some past posts on this blog you will see that I have been aiming
silver bullets at them (all right, I guess that’s for werewolves, so maybe that
explains why there are still so many of the zombie kind.) By the way, zombie ideas eat your brain and
keep you from thinking straight, so they are not to be welcomed, even if like
real (traditional) zombies they seem to save you from some heavy lifting.

The New York Times Sunday business section has just
given half a page to a zombie idea (Martin, C. [2016, Nov. 27]. A smashing new
way to relieve stress. NY Times, Business, p. 4). This story recounts how one
Donna Alexander has set up a for-profit Anger Room in Dallas, and how similar
rooms now exist in Houston, Toronto, Niagara Falls, and Australia. According to
the article, “the Anger Room charges $25 for five minutes [yes, you read it
correctly, minutes] of crushing
printers, alarm clocks, glass cups, vases, and the like.” Persons desiring to smash things can get
special set-ups for $500 dollars or so—one of those having been “a faux retail
store, replete with racks of clothing.” ”. Recently, mannequins dressed as Trump or
Clinton have been available for smashing. The idea is that this is a space
where “stressed-out people could relieve their tension in a safe, non-violent
way”.

The zombie idea at work here is the belief that by
acting angry, people can get rid of persistent uncomfortable anger and
frustration that they experience. This belief, often referred to as catharsis,
dates back to the ancient Greek drama, whose audiences were thought to benefit
from the vicarious experience of sadness and grief. Sigmund Freud expanded this
idea to suggest that all kinds of lingering negative emotions could be
re-experienced in some way and deactivated as a result. Freud’s view involved a
hydraulic metaphor for emotion, as if it were water collecting and pressing
hard against a dam, which could be drained in order to release the pressure.

Two points about this zombie idea: First, doesn’t it
seem odd that no one ever worries that acting happy will remove happiness from
your life? Presumably, if catharsis worked for one kind of emotion, it ought to
work for all of them, no? Second (and more important), research like that
published by Jill Littrell almost 20 years ago has clearly indicated that
behaving in an angry way actually makes people feel more angry, not less.

Although it’s
clearly time for this idea to lie down and let itself be buried, Alexander and
other people in the rage business find the zombie idea too profitable to let
go. Is what they are doing fraudulent? Probably so, but to win a lawsuit
against them, a client would have to show that the owners knew you can’t
destroy anger this way, and also would have to demonstrate that he or she had
actually been harmed. These things are not very likely to happen.

Although the writer Claire Martin was obviously mainly
interested in the Anger Room as a business venture, she should be given credit
for consulting a clinical psychologist about the emotional benefits of smashing
things. The person she talked to, UCLA psychologist George Slavin, warned that
physiological responses during angry behavior can actually be bad for health,
and recommended that people who feel tense and angry should use cognitive
therapy and stress-reduction techniques to help them feel better in the face of
the stresses of daily life. He described the idea that acting angry can relieve
stress as “appealing” but not supported by evidence. But although Martin
included these remarks, she spent all the rest if the article talking about related
business ventures.

Zombie ideas of all
kinds are “appealing” in the sense that they are simple and familiar and don’t require
us to do much mental heavy lifting. Some of them, like the Anger Room idea, are
presented to us over and over because they can be so profitable for a few
individuals—so they become even more familiar than they were at the beginning.
Claire Martin’s article in the Times did
this job too, even though she paid lip service to “giving the other side” in a
couple of paragraphs. Her focus was on the bottom line for the entrepreneurs.
If you and I want to emphasize the bottom line of our own well-being, we need
to watch out for the zombies.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.